As he flummoxed a fair few art historians with his hoax biography of the non-existent American painter Nat Tate, there's little reason to take anything William Boyd says on trust. But this silkily persuasive memoir, complete with index and foot-notes, could well send you to double-check whether Logan Mountstuart, dilettante man of letters, art-dealer, socialite and spy, really existed. When Mountstuart buys up Tates for his Manhattan gallery, the illusion is complete. But this is more than an elaborate game - it's a magnificently realised fiction spanning the cultural life of the 20th century, in which Mountstuart rubs shoulders with Woolf and Waugh in London, Picasso and Hemingway in Paris and Edward and Mrs Simpson in the Bahamas. Somehow Boyd bestows these cameos with the effortless credence of one who was actually there. Not as stately as Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time , but a great jazz-age jig none the less. Alfred Hickling

Heaven's Edge, by Romesh Gunesekera (Bloomsbury, £6.99)

Since the appearance of his exotic Sri Lankan fable, Reef , almost 10 years ago, Gunesekera has been heralded as a lyrical observer of despoiled paradises. His trouble-in-the-tropics formula seems to be wearing a little thin, however; Heaven's Edge is a disappointingly routine adventure tale with scenery from Conrad and a plot from Boy's Own magazine. London layabout Marc leaves his mouse-ridden flat to seek out the remote Indian Ocean island where his father's fighter plane went down in flames. There he finds an oppressed population, a Lara Croft fantasy for a girlfriend and, after a great many explosions, himself. While you could generously characterise the narrative as "dreamlike", Gunesekera withholds a frustrating amount of information. The name of the regime, the reason for the war, even the island itself remain unspecified, which makes it very difficult to know how to avoid taking a holiday there by accident. AH

The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargos Llosa (Faber, £7.99)

May 30 1961. There are rumours of the US, smarting from the Bay of Pigs, sending in marines to prevent a communist uprising in the Dominican Republic. But the bullets that riddle "the Goat", aka cancer-ridden septuagenarian Generalissimo Trujillo, are from his own vanguard. The Catholic church cites Aquinas to condone the dictator's demise: "God looks with favour upon the physical elimination of the Beast if a people is freed thereby." This is spliced with the present-day return of Urania Cabral to her native island and dying father after a 35-year absence. The parallel unveiling of her curtailed childhood powers the narrative emotionally as Vargos Llosa effortlessly leaps through timeframes and back again within a matter of sentences, shaping fiction out of political reality. The rawness of the storytelling belies his technique, while his use of sexual violence as political metaphor packs a visceral punch.

Sarah Adams

Longing, by Gunnar Kopperud (Bloomsbury, £6.99)

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a poem in which all the journeys made during a person's lifetime mapped the lines of their own face. It's a cartography that overlaps with the universe explored by Norwegian war reporter, philosopher and translator Gunnar Kopperud (here exquisitely translated by Christopher Jamieson). Dreams have place-names (Timbuktu represents oblivion and Patagonia a fresh start), yet homing pigeons lose their way because mobile phones interfere with the electromagnetic fields by which they navigate. The unnamed protagonists are a male European war reporter and a female north African freedom fighter. She has killed, he has written about it, but both are chasing after ideals. Their story proves frustratingly elusive in this blend of myth, travelogue and fiction, which has overtones of the Swedish author Sven Lindqvist or the Bruce Chatwin of Songlines. Still, Kopperud's haunting voice kept me coming back for more. SA